Our cabin has fallen into disrepair. The light that used to crawl, green, across the kitchen in the early morning and settle in my lap like a kitten, is now tumbling over dusty floorboards. Empty rooms are boarded up and forgotten, after some final long holiday. The light – last to go– still plays tangled in cobwebs in the gabled roof, not my hair.
This cabin is a luxury we could afford to hold onto, like dreams half-remembered, plans unspoken and laid aside. After the light, forgetting is the last to go.
Weeds have grown on the path. Time passes here and it doesn’t. There’s the room at the end of the hall where you holed up for an entire season while the ice shook our bones and slicked the porch steps. There’s the bloodstain on the carpet, still, where I drew such perfect lines, trying to reason with your ghost, back when we both could feel. Nobody wants to live in a haunted house.
There are boxes in the bedroom, unlabeled and hastily packed, that I will never open: my grandmother’s silver and a lock of your hair and souvenirs from the desert, where it is warm. The key is in my hand. There is a wind chime on the sunken porch, crying, and I will stand here forever until the echo dies, until this all passes away – door off the hinges, walls in nests against the cold, cold ground.
Words and photo © Jaime Greenberg, 2022
